Linux in the Enterprise at LWE 2003

Weather Fit for a Penguin

To say that the weather was cold at this year's LinuxWorld Expo at New
York's Jacob K. Javits
Center can hardly do justice to the feeling of walking across
34th Street. The cold cut like a knife; of course it was
impossible to get a cab going to the center due to NYC's unending traffic
problems and cabbies' general avoidance of destinations near the river
with few return-fare possibilities. Among the throngs of fellow native
New Yorkers, tourists, and Linux devotees freezing in the streets, I was
sure I saw some actual penguins sunning themselves or being chased by
hungry polar bears that couldn't score lunch reservations at Nobu.

First Show of a New Era

If tradeshow size is any indication, we may be in a new era of
austerity when it comes to introducing products in the computer industry.
This year's show took up just one exhibit hall in the Javits Center. The
2001 LinuxWorld Expo show was much larger (although not as huge as the
boom-time, pre-crash show of 2000) and featured a more varied array of
companies.

The lack of small companies with new products also made this year's
show different. Large companies--IBM,
HP, Intel, and Dell--dominated the show floor in the
hardware space, but one (relatively) new entrant, Egenera, did get a lot of attention
with its very impressive SAN/PAN based clusters. Egenera is a company to
watch: the capabilities of its servers and the intensity with which it is
working to deliver performance bring to mind another high-performance
computing company of years past--Cray Research.

Check out what went on at the O'Reilly booth and find out who the drawing winners are.

Computer Associates (CA), Red Hat, Ximian and, surprisingly, Microsoft held down the software
front in terms of mainstream companies producing general-purpose software.
(Of course, Microsoft's focus was on how to replace your Unix and Linux
servers with Windows.) All of the focus was on integrating Linux systems
at every level of the enterprise. For CA this meant releasing new or
updated Linux clients for everything from their ARCServe Apache and
MySQL/Database backup software to tools to manage WebSphere systems. For
Ximian and Red Hat it was demonstrating new versions of their desktop and
advanced server systems, respectively.

There were few smaller software companies in attendance this year and
even fewer fledgling or user-group booths. Most of these were placed at
the far edge of the show floor away from the highly trafficked aisles.
Presumably this can be chalked up to the expense of renting booth space at
a venue like the Javits Center and dismal economic conditions plaguing the
industry. Hopefully the economy will get back on its feet and there will
be more start-up and small innovator representation at the August
LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

What really set the LinuxWorld apart from the rest was the clear focus
of all the major participants on just one topic. Given the venue of New
York City, it's not too shocking that that topic was Financial Services
and the application of Linux-based hardware and software to meet the needs
of banks, brokerages, and money managers.

Financial Services Focus

What's surprising about the financial services focus of this LinuxWorld
show is that it seems to be exposing a trend in how Linux is growing into
new markets. The new growth pattern seems to be the horizontal integration
of Linux across a variety of platforms. This draws IT shops into the
realization that Linux is a stable and fast replacement for almost any
kind of expensive legacy system.

The origins of Linux are well known, and the financial incentives for
moving to Linux, although clear to in-the-know technologists for years,
have now found fertile ground with corporate CFOs who have to justify
their IT budgets in tight fiscal times.

The first real indication of this trend was seen in the supercomputing
marketplace. Previously, people who needed such power had to spend obscene
amounts of money on proprietary systems the had no growth path besides the
purchase of entirely new systems. Linux affords these users more bang for
their bucks. Next came the digital effects shops that learned how to take
advantage of parallel Linux clusters to make movies. Unfortunately, these
were niche markets that were easy for most business managers to dismiss
because they couldn't grok the bigger picture. Now a mostly
under-the-table trend--the adoption of Linux by Wall Street--has gone
public and the rest of the IT consuming community is jumping on board, not
just because the hardware is cheap but because the whole package (OS,
applications, desktop) is available no matter your platform.

The success in the financial services is the first mainstream
watershed "ah-hah!" moment for the Linux movement at large. When I helped
bring the Internet to Wall Street as a Vice President at JP Morgan years
ago, I worked for a Managing Director who said in 1991 that he'd rather
"depend on it [the Internet] for email rather than trust his paycheck to
be delivered over it." His point was well taken; in 1991 there wasn't a
critical mass of either mind-share or applications to make people
comfortable with the Internet as a business vehicle or a way to move
money. Online banking, trading, and ecommerce by the ordinary consumers
changed all that. Before Wall St. started using Linux in a big way, where
real money was at stake, it was easy to dismiss Linux as a niche and
something that you wouldn't want to use if "real money" were at stake.
That's not the case any more.

Expect some really big news popping up with the first spring flowers
as other business areas to start their wholesale adoption of Linux from
the bottom of the data center to desktops in the corporate office.

Enterprise Tools on Parade

Since it's clear Linux is no longer a dirty word in the mainstream IT
marketplace, what exactly is driving the adoption of Linux systems beyond
price? Lower TCO only goes so far once you have the boxes in the
door--there must be something that's attracting large enterprises to
Linux.

Most of the drivers are things we have covered in this column before:
massive integration, the ability of Linux to serve in multiple roles (mail
server, web server, development platform, parallel computer, etc.), but it
seems we have transcended these basic properties and are moving into the
realm of emergent properties. An emergent property is a feature
or characteristic larger than the natural sum of its constituent parts.
The ability of a collective of ants to work as individuals whose actions
constitute what appears to be collective planning is such an emergent
property. For Linux this means that we are seeing new collective
capabilities growing out of fairly straightforward technologies like
clustering, virtual machines, and virtualized storage.

In the Linux world there are several trends approaching emergent
capabilities and these were on display at LinuxWorld Expo. Here are a few
companies and products to watch:

Egenera had one of the most
impressive hardware displays at the show. They manufacture integrated
server-blade systems that combine the power of Itanium processors, SAN and
network mesh architecture, and mainframe-class management capabilities.

Qlusters is the company
bringing a commercialized version of Moshe Bar's OpenMosix to market.
OpenMosix allows completely automatic load balancing and process migration
on commodity Linux clusters. Dr. Bar and his team have extended the basic
OpenMOSIX framework to include migrate-able sockets and network
distributed shared memory (net-DSM), giving clusters an out-of-the-box
capability that will revolutionize the deployment of large-scale software
systems. At its booth Qlusters demonstrated automatic (or drag-and-drop
via a GUI) process migration with a vanilla copy of Oracle 9i. With
Qlusters software and a small cluster, it's possible to spend
approximately $60,000 on hardware and software and get $600,000 worth of
performance. This means applications can automatically scale onto
parallel clusters without rewriting any code and still see large
performance increases.

Linuxcare is familiar to many
in the Linux community because of the twists and turns in its corporate
history. The current product line will firmly cement Linux into really
large IBM mainframe environments, a venue that has long resisted change of
any kind. Linuxcare has developed a configuration management suite called
Levanta
for IBM's zVM line of machines that makes the management of thousands of
server instances a breeze. (I'll be writing an in-depth article on
Levanta soon.)

Powerllel is a software
company that I've covered before in this space. It develops software that
accelerates parallel applications; at this LinuxWorld, Powerllel
demonstrated middleware that allows off the shelf packages such as
Microsoft Excel to take advantage of clusters and grids transparently. It
was especially impressive when the cluster back-end was the large cluster
being demonstrated by Egenera.

In upcoming articles we'll dive deeper into some of the new trends as
well as new challenges facing Linux and the Linux community

David HM Spector
is President & CEO of Really Fast Systems, LLC, an
infrastructure consulting and product development company based in New York